ZoneMinder

ZoneMinder is a suite of applications intended for use in video camera security applications, including theft prevention and child or family member monitoring. It supports capture, analysis, recording, and monitoring of video data coming from one or more video or network cameras attached to a Linux system. It also features a user-friendly Web interface which allows viewing, archival, review, and deletion of images and movies captured by the cameras. The image analysis system is highly configurable, permitting retention of specific events, while eliminating false positives. ZoneMinder supports both directly connected and network cameras and is built around the definition of a set of individual 'zones' of varying sensitivity and functionality for each camera. This allows the elimination of regions which should be ignored or the definition of areas which will alarm if various thresholds are exceeded in conjunction with other zones. All management, control, and other functions are supported through the Web interface.

Recent releases

Release Notes: This release is mainly focused around a complete rewrite of the logging and debug functionality, which now includes a Web log viewer and fully consolidated logging. Support has also been added for SFTP in event uploads. There are also a small number of other useful new features and fixes.

Release Notes: This long awaited release brings improved compatibility with a number of updated third party packages. There were many reliability and performance updates plus a number of new features and fixes. A contributed iPhone interface was included.

Release Notes: This release contains an important security fix as well as a number of other minor fixes and features. It is recommended that this update be applied at the earliest opportunity. A patch containing the security fix is available from the Patches section of the Wiki. This patch can be applied to systems installed from an RPM or other packages.

Recent comments

ZoneMinder is a great piece of software. It you want to get a quick start, I've created a VMware appliance that is available here: http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrent-details&id=8d79715b757851eafcc89c569b11ad7d2bb96594 . It's based on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server with the bare minimum to get ZoneMinder to work (LAMP+ZoneMinder req's).

Wow!
(Weird site. I can add a comment, but I can't find other people's comments on ZoneMinder.)

Well, free software doesn't get any better than this. (OK OK---the Gnu C Compiler is still king by far, particularly when compared to that quick hack of a kernel, what is it called? Nullix?) I installed ZoneMinder on Ubuntu 7.10 server using apt-get on a US$300 pc. It simply ran. To be fair, I googled &quot;zoneminder install&quot; and read someone's advice to add user www-data to group video, and as an extra precaution I gave /dev/video0 mode 666. I have no idea how hard it would have been to debug any problem arising from lack of permissions.

I don't know what professional video surveillance system should look like, and by now it's too late to have an unbiased opinion, because ZoneMinder looks quite complete even for professional installations. I have used it for two days and with a single camera, on which I set up two zones. It works amazingly well. I plan on adding more cameras.

The zones make it possible to exclude vegetation, which could trigger false alarms when windy. I still get false alarms with fast moving clouds, but they are fairly infrequent, and it doesn't matter since I only use them for triggering recording events (using MODECT mode). So far I don't think it's missed any events, even using the lightweight motion detection algorithm.

The presentation of events and other stored or real-time information is well thought. The configurability is enormously simplified by the web interface, which is clear and comprehensive (and if you don't understand something you don't need to touch it---the defaults so far seem well guessed).

Of course two days is not enough to really know how well it works. But so far so good, and I'll be surprised if I run into major problems in the future. Good job.